


Last Offices

by tackytiger



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Blood and Injury, Character Death, Falling In Love, Flashbacks, Getting Together, Grief/Mourning, Happy Memories, M/M, Memories, Non-Linear Narrative, Preparation of a body for burial, Sad Harry Potter, Unhappy Ending, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:41:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27330637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tackytiger/pseuds/tackytiger
Summary: It didn't seem fair that Malfoy was dead, and Harry was supposed to just keep on living without him.He had lost enough people to know that he probablywouldkeep on going—his stubborn heart was still beating, after all, even though it felt like it was going to break.But first, he had to get through the laying out of the dead—those old Pureblood funeral rites—even if every time he touched Malfoy's too-cold body, he was reminded of how things used to be, and how things might have been.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 30
Kudos: 117
Collections: HP Suds Fest 2020





	Last Offices

**Author's Note:**

> The funeral rites described in the fic are based on old Irish burial customs.
> 
> A huge thank you to the fest mods, who are paragons of excellence and literal angels... okay but really. It has been a pleasure to work with Bella on this fest, and I'm so delighted that we got to share our love of all things bathing with all the wonderful contributors. Thank you, Bells, for being eternally brilliant (she really _is_ a paragon of excellence, to be fair, even if she'll never read this fic as it's MCD!)
> 
> And thank you to maesterchill and quicksilvermaid, both of whom licked this into shape when it REALLY wasn't working. You are both the absolute best and I'm very lucky to have you.

Harry didn’t know what to do after Draco died. He didn’t just mean that he didn’t know what to do with himself—with his empty hands, his empty bed, the persistent pain as his stubborn heart just kept on beating no matter how pointless it seemed—though that was true too.

But he didn’t know what to do _specifically_ after Draco died—what he was supposed to do with the body, how he was supposed to organise the funeral—and he didn't _want_ to know, either. Before the whole thing happened, Harry would never have imagined losing Draco, not when they were both still so young. Draco always seemed so alive, brimming with a gleeful sort of energy, and it had always made Harry feel hot-blooded and taken over by him. He felt like Draco couldn’t possibly be gone, not really.

But Draco _was_ dead, and his dad was still in Azkaban and his mum had taken to her bed when she heard the news, so it was up to Harry to do everything for his funeral. There were customs, and ceremonies, and conventions to be followed—everyone told him, once he asked, that it was important to do these things. It seemed like a futile act, to try to wrap up the huge magic of Draco into these smaller, meaner magics, but Harry wanted to do things right. To have Draco remembered as he deserved.

It was Luna who told him what to do in the end, because she always knew this stuff. But Harry was glad, in a horrible way, to have something to focus on—because when he thought about having to let Draco go for good he felt like he might just crumble under the sheer horror of it. It was better to keep busy, while he could.

He couldn’t stop thinking about the last time Draco had been alive. He’d been there when Draco died, holding his hand so hard that he left bruises across those elegant pale knobs of knuckles, and when the Healers had tried to take Draco away and do whatever it was that they do in these cases, Harry had screamed his throat raw and held on to the body (the agonising taunt of the lingering warmth of it) and they had just let him be, in the end. Let him stay there with the body, Draco’s body, the body that Harry had thought he had his whole life to learn over and over again.

They had the fucker who had cast the curse, at least. But he wasn’t talking, and Harry hadn’t recognised the words nor the wand movement, so Harry knew that the Healers would have to take Draco away eventually, so they could work out exactly what had killed him.

The sight of Draco falling had been suddenly and horribly familiar, as had the unfurling ribbons of blood. Through it all, Harry had been able to keep his head and get that shitty excuse for a criminal into a proper Bind. It had only taken him about twenty seconds to get it all under control, but he had still been too slow. He thought about it so much that he wondered if he was going to go mad from it. Because after all, he had done everything he’d been trained to do—secured the suspect, called in the duty Aurors, summoned the field Healer—but he was still too late to save Draco.

And the worst part, the most awful part, was that Draco had been so scared, at the end. He had gone so fast—Harry on his knees beside him, then (when it was obvious no Healing spells were working) under him, the too-dense weight of Draco in his lap, his hands scrabbling across Draco’s body, skidding in the blood that just kept on coming, trying to find some part of him to hold onto.

“Harry,” Draco had tried to say, but he was frenzied from pain and his mouth was a froth of blood. 

And Harry had found Draco’s hand and held on, the tips of his fingers wedged into the dents between Draco’s knuckles, and he had said, “No,” like that meant anything at all, then “Draco.” He'd _tried_ to say, “I love you,” no matter that half the Auror squad was there to hear it, only they never really said that to each other, and it felt too weird and final.

But then Draco died, on one last pained bubbling futile gasp, and Harry wished he had said it anyway, because anything would have been better than just letting Draco go like that, while choking silently on his own preemptive grief. 

He’d closed Draco’s eyes himself, left claret smears over the pale petals of Draco’s eyelids as he’d thumbed them shut, which was better at least than having to look at them, sightless and dark with terror. 

Draco really hadn’t wanted to die.

He had let them take the body away after a while, though in the end they’d had to charm him calm to dull him enough that he let go of Draco. He was distantly surprised at the ferocity of his grief, how the self-pitying pull of it threatened to tug him under, how it had scraped all his behaviour down to the raw bare bones of his own desperate sorrow. Nothing mattered, it felt like, nothing but this loss, and it settled into him, persistent and ever-present. He didn't think it would be going away any time soon.

Narcissa had Owled to say that she wanted to hold the funeral at the Manor, have Draco interred in the family crypt. And really, Draco might have preferred that. He’d always loved the Manor, even after he moved out and into the shitty little flatshare, and after that again when he was spending most of his time at Grimmauld even if neither he nor Harry had ever really officially discussed living together. 

But Harry was too possessive of Draco, still. He couldn’t have given him over to anyone else, couldn’t have sent him away a second before he absolutely had to, not even when having him meant only this cruel mockery of what had been.

Also, Harry didn’t think he could bear to go out to the Manor ever again, let alone now, in the haze of midsummer, when every slice of sunlight through the stained glass of the entrance hall would remind him of when Draco had kissed him for the first time, so late into his twenty-third birthday party that it was actually morning, both of them still drunk. Their lips had glanced off each other, their aim off from the booze, and then Draco had laughed, dry and disbelieving and fond, right into Harry’s waiting, open mouth. 

Because Harry _had_ been waiting, felt like he might have been waiting for years really, though not entirely sure when it had all clicked into place for him. He’d spent the whole party watching Draco with a slow, creeping sort of hunger, wondering if Draco had caught onto it.

And then Draco had looked over at him speculatively and smiled that infuriating, arch smile of his, and offered to show Harry around the house—a flimsy excuse, since the party was almost over and anyway no one would have believed that Harry would want to look around the old Voldemort murder house. But he had said yes too eagerly anyway, unashamed of it, knowing what Draco had really meant. Draco had walked him down the corridor into the hall, and backed him up against the panelling at the bottom of the stairs, and purposefully slid a hand up Harry’s t-shirt, setting a shiver over the tensing muscles of his stomach. 

So he couldn’t take Draco back to the Manor—couldn’t bear to be reminded of the ghost of Draco’s mouth on his for the first time, the memory of the feel of him under Harry’s hands, the way they’d slid down the wall and kissed against the wainscoting, Harry landing half in Draco’s lap, the very real heat of him a delicious surprise. It had been worth the wait.

But that was all long ago, and now Draco’s cold body was in Harry’s house, the house that had been _their_ house. In some ways, Draco looked just like he always had, because he was still handsome and severe, with that thin crooked mouth of his that Harry had liked—so much!—to kiss. 

In fact, he had tried it after they brought the body back from the hospital, and everyone had tactfully left to give Harry time alone to say his goodbyes, or some other awful idea that made no sense at all. Because when Harry thought about it, it seemed impossible that anyone would expect him to wrap up everything that had happened into some kind of farewell.

But he had tried. 

He’d kissed Draco’s mouth, right on the curve of his upper lip, then along to the dimpled crease that deepened when he smiled. But it had felt all wrong, of course, too cold and unmoving, and Harry felt weird for having done it, so he picked up Draco’s hand and kissed that instead. The body had been cleaned up, all the blood Scourgified away with hospital-grade spellwork, so there was only the faint medicinal tang of that from Draco’s skin. 

No real sense of him was left for Harry, even though his hands _looked_ the same; the well-defined ridge of pale knuckles, the elegant scrolling curve of his lifeline, the thin scar at the very base of his thumb from the time in third year that his Potions knife had slipped (Harry remembered it, remembered feeling a bit glad about it, Malfoy pale and sweating at the sight of the blood). But he was just too cold, of course, too still, and so Harry stopped trying to kiss any part of him and just sat uselessly smoothing a thumb over the bruises his own fingers had left from holding Draco’s hand as he died, and waited awkwardly for the others to come back in.

“Open the window, for fuck’s sake,” Pansy said when they all trooped back in, and instead of waiting for Harry to do it, she went over to the big casement and shoved it up violently. “The last thing you want is his ghost hanging around,” she told Harry. “Although,”—her mouth was over-lipsticked, a dangerous red, like a useful weapon— “I suppose, knowing you, you wouldn’t mind keeping him here. Well, it’s not happening.” 

As she spoke, she wrenched the curtains back fully. Outside, through the muddy warp of old glass, the sky was a clear, pale grey like the inner ring of Draco’s irises had been. When Pansy turned, Harry could see the thin lines of strain around her eyes. Draco had loved her for a long time—not as _much_ as he loved Harry, probably, but it was a close thing—and Harry loved her by extension, even as she looked at him with the same wary sort of suspicion she always had. She had always said that Harry was trouble, and she had been right in the end. 

She flapped a hand lazily over Draco—over the body—in a shooing motion, and then allowed it to rest, gently, momentarily, on the spot under which Draco’s heart used to beat. “Go on,” she said spitefully for Harry’s benefit, leaning over Draco, whispering in his ear just like she always had. “Don’t hang around for him. He’s done enough damage.”

She cried then, silent angry tears that dropped into the shell of Draco’s ear and collected in the fine curling hair at the nape of his neck, and she stroked her shaky hand over Draco’s cheek briefly, perfunctorily, and Harry saw in the gesture a flash of some long-ago half-forgotten memory, Draco with his green and silver tie askew, laughing down at Pansy, her hand skimming the fine aristocratic arch of his cheekbone. They had all been so young then, and the two of them were so bright and eager for each other in a way that Harry hadn’t understood back then, and had been jealous of. Such Slytherins, both of them, Harry had thought; careless of anyone but themselves, complicit in their disdain for others. But he’d been wrong about that, it turned out; it was just how it had _seemed_ to Harry back then, who after all had always been on the winning side.

“Buck up, Parkinson,” Ron said briskly, but his hands were gentle when he steered her away from the body, and she went with him willingly enough, which was still a new enough development that Harry was surprised by it, and for one horrible moment looked around to catch Draco’s eye and laugh about it, and then remembered with a sick unsteady feeling that he wouldn’t get to laugh with Draco about anything ever again.

“The mirrors are all covered, Harry, and we’ve shut the curtains in all the other rooms,” Hermione said gently. “I think that’s everything we need to… Oh, and the clocks are stopped, we didn’t know the exact time that he—well… but it’ll be close enough. Though you’ll have a tricky time getting the kitchen clock started again, it kept trying to chime for dinner…” She trailed off, maybe remembering that Draco had been the one who did most of the cooking, and perhaps understanding that Harry felt like he might never want to eat again, because just by doing these ordinary things he was acknowledging that somehow, life was going to go on without Draco. And that, even after everything, seemed inconceivable.

Luna was the only one of them who still looked unperturbed. Rather, she looked steely—strong, unmovable—as she stood with hands on hips and stared at the body. 

“It’s time, I think,” she said. “Do you need me to tell you what to do, Harry?”

Yes, Harry started to say, of course. Of course I don’t know what to do here, with the man I love cut open and bleeding to death at the age of twenty-seven, and a funeral to plan, and his body here on my dining room table waiting to be laid out. But he felt his face begin to crumple, his eyes hot and stinging, his mouth too wet all of a sudden, and Luna just looked at him sympathetically and patted his arm gently. 

“Okay,” she said thoughtfully. “Okay.”

They all worked together, in the end, Ron and Pansy and Hermione and Theo and Ginny, pale under her freckles, and even Anthony popped in with coffees and pastries from the fancy cafe down the road, and a quick kiss for Hermione. Soon the room was clean, furniture gleaming wetly from the waxing charms, the rug shaken out. They had the candles, and the good razor, and the half-empty bottle of body wash that Harry had found still uncapped from Draco’s last shower before they went to work on the morning that it happened, not knowing Draco wouldn’t be coming home alive; and they had Draco’s good robes ready—his dark blue ones, the silk puddled like inkspill over the back of a chair, the ones that made his eyes look that particular shade of grey (gunmetal, smoke, something fierce and dangerous) that Harry loved. Though that didn’t matter, of course, because his eyes were shut.

“It’s time to wash him now,” Luna said, and then Harry saw Ginny coming back into the room with a pitcher of water, the surface mirrored and trembling as she crossed the room. Luna picked up a cloth.

“It should be Harry,” Ron said, and Pansy looked at him across the room angrily but nodded, and Harry could hear Theo crying very quietly, and then Ginny went and took the cloth from Luna gently and handed it to Harry.

“Send him on his way,” she said.

There was a sheet laid over Draco, one of the papery, crisp, Mungos-issue ones, and it slid to the floor like a fall of water when Harry twitched it away gingerly. Under it, Draco was naked, the rack of his ribs standing out spare and bleached like he was already bone, the soft fall of his cock and the curved musculature of his thighs and the strong lines of his forearms at once horribly familiar and completely foreign. This close, Harry could tell that he smelled faintly of disinfectant, and under that the strange, ozoney scent of long-lasting Stasis charms. For one desperate moment, Harry wanted to put the sheet back, to tuck Draco in, away from all the eyes. But it wasn’t him there on the table, not really, not anymore. And anyway, Draco probably wouldn’t have minded. He always had been fairly pragmatic.

Luna had to talk Harry through it, in the end. The whole thing was completely baffling; all those awful old traditions that Harry knew nothing about, because the people who might have told him about all this stuff had died too soon themselves. But surely, Harry thought, no one else who had died—not his parents, or Remus, not Sirius, or Dumbledore, or even Colin Creevy— would have wanted it done like that, with all the futility and wretched solemnity of the old Pureblood rituals. 

It didn’t feel anything like when Dobby had died—there was no sense of purpose, no grim satisfaction in hard work, no losing himself in a simple act of honour. It was just the bare, terrible fact of Draco’s dead body, the senselessness of him being gone, and Harry having to uncoil the snarled angry mess of his own misery for long enough to take care of all these small, mundane deeds.

For a moment, he felt a sort of furious helplessness at the self-indulgent irony of having to do the whole stupid thing by hand, but thinking of someone else doing it made him feel even more wretched. He just had to get it over with. His fingers tapped a restless tattoo over the arch of Draco’s right foot while he worked up the courage to touch the too-cold rest of him. 

Maybe even Draco wouldn’t have wanted all this, Harry thought. They’d never got around to discussing it, of course, why the fuck would they have? They thought they had a lifetime. But he’d promised Narcissa he’d do the thing right, and after all she had nothing left now. It was the least he could do, to have Draco ready when she arrived to watch him go into the ground.

In the end, Ron spoke the old blessings over the body, because Harry didn’t know the words and anyway he didn’t trust his mouth. When Ron stood at the head of the body—one hand resting lightly on that soft over-long fall of hair that Draco had always had to flick out of his eyes—Harry started to cry, and no matter what he did, he couldn’t stop it. His whole face was wet, every bit of him felt sloppy and leaking, and through it all he had to shave Draco’s face—the first step in the funeral ritual, apparently. He ran the razor over Draco’s jawline resentfully, and his hot angry tears kept spilling out. All he could hear were the wet sounds of his pathetic snuffles, the gasp of his caught breaths, the loud raw noises of his humiliating grief. He was glad Draco wasn’t there to witness it.

He fumbled his glasses off, and beside him, Luna patted his shoulder, and Pansy told him crossly that all this crying before the body was ready was going to invite bad spirits in, but getting to be mean to Harry always seemed to cheer her up a bit, and he knew none of them really believed all of that nonsense anyway.

He put a hand under the ridge of Draco’s jaw, pressed at the slack useless pulsepoint to stretch the skin out for the razor’s sweep, fingers rasping against the stubble he could feel rather than see. 

And with just the small rough touch of the fine pinpricks of Draco’s facial hair, he was back in the Manor, the low lemony morning sun pouring through the stained glass, his own lust-slack body straining down into Draco underneath him, and that glorious first kiss which had bled into their second and their third and on and on, like neither of them could ever get enough. And then a door opening, Theo stumbling out laughing, with some Slytherin girls Harry hadn’t bothered learning the names of, and when they saw Harry in Draco’s arms they’d laughed and laughed, and shouted, “Happy birthday, Draco!” in their horrible snide voices, and Draco—still alive then, so alive and so warm and solid under Harry—had gently but firmly pushed Harry out of his lap and stood up (adjusting himself casually and shamelessly, Harry remembered, the absolute bastard) and wandered off up the stairs with his friends without even looking back.

Harry had stormed off to the cloakroom (who even has a cloakroom, he remembered thinking) and taken an angry piss, and then stood looking at himself in the small mirror above the sink. His mouth was swollen, kiss-ravaged, the skin of his chin mottled with stubble burn, and he wanted to be back there in the hallway with nothing but Draco against him, and he was still thinking about that when Hermione found him and told him it was time to leave. 

“Draco’s gone to bed, so we can just Floo straight home,” she said, and her reflection in the mirror looked pale and exhausted, and Harry thought of the pretty Slytherin girls, and Nott with his sly, enticing mouth, and he flinched without meaning to, and Hermione understood straight away.

“Why do you even like him?” she asked sympathetically, and Harry snapped back at her, “I don’t.” Which wasn’t even that much of a lie, he didn’t like Draco—they were teammates, not friends, he just _fancied_ him, for fuck’s sake. And he had gone home and slept the day away and woken in the cool creeping fuzz of dusk, and when he tongued at the raw skin of his mouth and felt the stubble burn there, he hated himself just a bit.

* * *

Harry set the razor down, turned his desperate, wet eyes to Luna, and she poured some warm water into a bowl for him, but she let him squeeze the shower gel in until the water was foamy and the air was thick with the same smell that used to fill the upstairs bathroom in Grimmauld every morning, and Harry felt sick with wanting to be back there.

He started with the feet. The flannel was too wet at first, and he had to wipe spreading pools of water off the table with his elbow, and the whole time, as he looked at Draco’s poor cold feet, all he could think of was himself in the small library in Grimmauld, and Draco up the ladder, listing precariously off to the side to try and reach a tiny edition of the workbook that went with Moste Potente Potions—rare apparently, and Draco treated Harry’s lack of appreciation for its wonder as a personal affront—and Draco’s bare ankles right in Harry’s eyeline where he was standing to steady the ladder. He had Seeker’s feet, Draco had—one crooked big toe from a bad Bludger, a callus on the ball of each foot from all the jogging he did, a fading yellowish bruise cradling the eggshell curve of his anklebone. His trousers were turned up, feet tensed on the topmost rung of the ladder as he strained higher, and Harry hadn’t been able to keep himself from leaning forward and touching his tongue to the flexing line of Draco’s Achilles tendon, then taking it between his teeth, testing out the strung-bow resistance of it when he bit gently down on it. Draco had frozen, the tension as he held himself still like a low hum between them.

Harry had eased the bite after one reckless moment, though he didn’t move away. “I don’t normally do this sort of thing,” he murmured into the thin skin of Draco’s ankle. He felt he had to say it, because things were new between them then, and he was still embarrassed by the ferocity of his strange attraction. He wanted Draco to know that he knew it was weird, this urge he had to _take_. But Draco had just said shakily, “I should hope not, most distracting, here… let me…” and all the while he was skidding unsteadily down the ladder until he was bracketed in Harry’s arms and Harry could press himself against Draco’s back and slip two fingers around his body and into the gap between buttons on his shirt. “You make me feel helpless,” Draco said crossly, breathlessly, arching back further into Harry’s arms, and Harry tightened his hold and bit at Draco’s soft earlobe, at the tender skin of his neck, at the muscle of his shoulder through his t-shirt… 

And just like that, Harry was back in the drawing room, gripping the flannel with one hand and Draco’s ankle with the other, and Draco’s feet were clean and damp, and the first, worst bit was over.

His hands were next, and that was strangely not so bad, because Harry had been holding onto them so much anyway, and at least they showed some of the damage, which helped a bit, weirdly. The Healers mustn’t have thought to fix the bruises there, even though they’d closed up all the cursewounds, the ones that had killed him so quickly. 

Harry picked up the right hand, with its broom-rough palm, and the thin wrist, and the bitten nails, and he dipped and wrung the cloth, and stroked; over the swell of flesh below his thumb, around the knob of bone at wrist, up and over heartline and lifeline, around each finger. 

_Those fingers, Harry thought..._ And Harry was in bed, in Draco’s bed in fact—the bed in Draco’s old flat (the weird flat with the bathroom down the hall and the hand-painted flowers on the kitchen cabinet, and the French flatmate who played Muggle guitar and had rigged up a sound system that was part Muggle equipment, part Sonorus Charm). But for once, they were alone in the flat, and Draco had hurried Harry along the windowless corridor to his small room, pushing him with a firm hand at the base of his back, and Harry had just gone with it, half-excited and half-terrified at the thought of finally getting to see Draco naked.

They had kissed for a long time on Draco’s neatly-made bed, messing up the duvet until they were all a tangle of half-removed clothes and damp skin, and then Draco had said very politely, “I think we should have sex now,” and Harry had laughed. But then he had noticed Draco’s offended look, and he had pulled Draco back down onto him and kissed him again, and said, “Yes, yes please, now,” so urgently that Draco had got that focused, self-satisfied look back on his face, and had taken all the rest of Harry’s clothes off very quickly. 

And Harry was fully naked all of a sudden, and Draco stood up to take his own jeans off. He had got as far as unbuttoning them, when he looked at Harry very seriously and said, “Wait.” And Harry did wait, just rolled over onto his side and propped himself up on Draco’s pillow and watched as Draco eased his rings off—the heavy silver signet that used to have the Malfoy crest on it but was now blank, and the small twisted gold wire one that Draco flicked at unconsciously when he was nervous, and the slightly lumpy one that Draco had made himself at a silversmithing class in the local adult education centre that he took because he was bored one winter—and placed them on the bedside cabinet. Each one made a low dense thump as he put it down. The room was very quiet, and Draco took his time, and he watched Harry the whole time as he slid the rings off ever so slowly. And Harry watched as each finger was revealed, and then he thought about what Draco was going to do with those fingers now the rings were off, and he had to hide his face in the pillow for a minute as Draco laughed quietly at him from the edge of the bed.

So it was almost unbearable when Luna said quietly, “You’re doing great,” and Harry blinked back into the room, and was assaulted anew by the endless stillness of Draco’s fingers, and he squeezed them gently (probably for the last time) and then put Draco’s hand down.

It got easier if he didn’t think about it too much—if it wasn’t _Draco’s body_ , just the body, all broken up into manageable parts—and it was easy to find a rhythm in the repetitive movements. He used to wash Draco all the time, after training, when he came back grimy and exhausted and quiet, head full of tactics. It had been soothing for Harry as well. There was still something of that comfort in the act, even after everything. 

_Wiping up the leg, into the fold at the back of the knee…_ and Draco was under him, this time in Harry’s bed, his ankle resting on Harry’s shoulder. He was wearing all his rings that time, and they caught the moonlight where his fingers were tensing and releasing in the sheets. Harry was still over him—in him—aching to move, but waiting for that curious flood of fullness in his chest to pass, the one that caught him off-guard so often and left him undefended against that careful, wanting look in Draco’s eyes.

“Come on, Potter,” Draco murmured, and Harry could see the wet gleam of his mouth even in the darkness. Harry had leaned forwards, then, pushing down on Draco’s leg, bending himself in half, wanting to be _closer_. The kiss was almost absent-minded, though he had to strain to drop his mouth onto that pale secret nook of skin at the back of Draco’s knee, but Draco had shivered at the touch.

“You like that?” Harry said, doing it again, and Draco didn’t answer at first, but then he let his leg slide off Harry’s shoulder and outwards, the shift in angle drawing a surprised moan from Harry. And Draco had said sharply, “I don’t think anyone’s ever touched me there before,” and then shrugged helplessly, looking at Harry like he thought he had some sort of purpose, and Harry realised that was the first time he had looked at Draco and really thought, “Mine.”

 _The arc of a hipbone, clean and unblemished…_ Not friends yet, but no longer sworn enemies, and Draco was wincing, holding a hand to his side. Teddy, who can’t have been more than three then, was running around hopped up on birthday excitement, and Andromeda had finally allowed Harry to buy him a training broom, and Harry and Draco were quiet and companionable together as they shot Cushioning Charms at the grass. Neither of them wanted to be the one to ruin Teddy’s first fly with an argument. But Draco’s mouth was tight with some sort of pain, and when he laid a careful hand to his hipbone, Harry saw under the hem of his t-shirt a horrid dark bruise, and he remembered the Bludger from earlier, the sound cracking around the stadium and Draco swaying on his broom, and then shaking his head and motioning impatiently for them to play on. 

“Why didn’t you get that healed?” he asked brusquely, then worried for a moment that he’d shattered the fragile peace. But then Draco had sighed and said, “I didn’t want to be late to the party,” and dropped his hand with a grimace before walking away, and Harry had stared at his back with a sort of uneasy curiosity and thought, _he loves Teddy too_.

 _Moving on to Draco’s throat, the water cooling now, and pooling in the dip at the collarbone over the tail of the Sectumsempra scar…_ and they were both nineteen and fighting in the Puddlemere changing room, still as stupidly angry at each other as they always had been in school, and Harry thought Draco was a cowardly racist prick (and he _had_ been, Harry wasn’t wrong, but he was trying not to be, and Harry hadn’t understood that then, or cared) and Draco said he didn’t give a fuck, that he was just here to play and if Harry didn’t like that he could fuck off, and Harry had got him by the neck up against the lockers, and Draco had struggled, and that was the first time Harry had seen what he had done to Draco in the bathroom in Sixth Year. He hadn’t even thought about it much after it happened—it had been a war, after all, and Draco had probably deserved it—but when Draco’s training jersey gaped open at the neck, right under Harry’s fist, and he’d seen the ropey vein of scar tissue, he had felt the sudden sick weight of guilt settle on him. He’d walked away and swore to himself that he’d never fight with Draco again.

 _Down the shoulder to the elbow..._ but he did fight with Draco again, and it was bitter and vicious and awful, and Harry was choking and queasy from Draco’s elbow hard in his stomach, and Draco was spitting blood and swearing at Harry like he hated him as much as he always had. But that time, when their coach found them and asked what was happening, he just narrowed his eyes and said that it was nothing at all, just a misunderstanding, and went back to his broom. Harry had watched him as he went, already feeling bruised.

 _One arm under Draco’s neck, lifting him awkwardly, moving the cloth in small circles over the ridge of his scapula…_ and it was the summer Harry turned twenty-one and he was miserable all the time, and even being on a broom every day didn’t help, and he didn’t know what to do. And he was just out of training, desperate to get home or be anywhere else other than the training ground, only when he hit the changing room Draco was leaning against the physio’s table, gingerly rolling his shoulder as he waited to be seen. He was topless and unselfconscious, stretching all the fine bones of his spine and relaxing, his upper arms pale as milk above the line where his golden summer tan stopped. He was talking to Macauley, laughing up at him with something like ease, and then he caught Harry’s eye for just a moment and there was that flicker of the old animosity before he smiled, small and careful. _Oh,_ Harry had thought. And then, _oh shit_ , and he had taken his gear and left without looking back.

 _Draco’s face, the fine, straight nose…_ and Draco was at the bar, laughing at something Harry said, and then all of a sudden he got very serious and ran a finger down the bridge of Harry’s nose, almost cross-eyed with the effort of focusing after the fifteen million drinks they’d had. “It’s crooked,” he said sadly, and “I never said sorry, did I?” and “I am, I am sorry,” and Harry waved him off, and told him it was fine. And when Draco was leaning over the bar and shouting out the order for yet another round, he realised it really _was_ fine.

 _And the flannel left a damp sheen over Draco’s closed mouth…_ and there was that first kiss in the Manor again, and that wasn’t even the best of them. There had been so many of them, Harry couldn’t hope to remember them all—kiss after kiss after kiss, strung out over the years but not enough, and Harry had thought, foolishly, that there would always be more time...

 _One last pass, back down the body, throat to stomach to groin, over the pads of the thigh muscles, still strong and defined even now…_ and Harry was twenty-two, and feeling a bit less miserable, and he was sitting by the Lake with Hogwarts behind him and the shimmer of a Warming Charm around him. Draco was skimming stones. 

“I’m quitting the team,” Harry told him, and Draco’s next throw went down with a plop and a ripple. 

“Okay,” Draco said. “That’s good. That’s good, I think. What are you going to do instead?”

Harry told him—told him the thing that hadn’t told anyone else yet—and held his breath with the magnitude of it.

“Right,” Draco said thoughtfully, and then he walked back towards Harry, and dropped down to a crouch in front of him. He looked at Harry interestedly. “I can see it. It makes a lot of sense, actually. You’ll be a good Auror, Potter.” And that had been that, and Harry hadn’t regretted any of it, not in the two years of training and two years on the beat, and all the exams and bureaucracy. He’d loved it all, right up until the day he had met Draco for lunch and they’d got caught up in a botched robbery attempt and Draco had just been unlucky. In the most profound way, it should have been Harry. He wished it had been.

“It’s done,” Ron told him, and he let the cloth fall with a wet slap into the pitcher. And it _was_ done, the body fresh and dewy and smelling ever so slightly _right_ for the first time since the curse had hit. And then they dressed him, and they were all crying, even Hermione who hadn’t ever really liked Draco, not even after Harry told her that Draco was _it_ for him. He wished he’d told Draco that, when he was still alive.

Every inch of skin had some sort of memory, Harry thought. He had known that body, over years and years, over acres of Quidditch pitches, through blood and sweat and spit and come; he had known him from the inside out, the stretch of him as he opened up, and the sounds he made when he was turned on or fucked out or hungry or sad or angry; he had known that he could never get enough of Draco, and now he really never would, and he couldn’t put the goodbye off any longer.

Narcissa arrived, looking just like herself only paler, and when she walked into the parlour and saw the body she stopped still for one awful moment, but then she smiled a chilly smile at Harry and nodded, and sat down stiffly. And after her came everyone else, Draco’s teammates, and Harry’s colleagues who had tried so hard to help in those terrible last few minutes, and people from school, and some reporters that Harry recognised but couldn’t work up the energy to hate, and lots of people Harry didn’t know.

Harry didn’t remember much from the funerals after the Battle, but he dimly remembered the wailing, though he hadn’t known it was part of the ritual until Narcissa crooked a finger at an old witch in a hooded cloak, and the woman started shrieking. Beside him, Hermione murmured, “How ghastly,” in a fascinated voice, and then looked guiltily down at her hands. 

It should have been ridiculous, Harry thought, and maybe if Draco was there and it was anyone else who had died, Harry would have been able to find it silly. Across the room, the curled edges of the curtain fluttered, then sank quietly back to stillness. The old woman’s cries trembled and rose like a song, then died down to a small gurgle of grief. Her tears were real; Harry could see them sliding unchecked down her face. Beside him, Narcissa had a very white handkerchief held to her mouth, and an almost imperceptible shake in her hand.

From down the hall, Harry heard a distant chime, as his wayward kitchen clock defiantly struck the hour. Dinner time, he thought, and then he let himself think of Draco lazily shaking a frying pan, smiling at Harry across the kitchen, and he cried again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading.
> 
> I welcome chats on Tumblr - [I'm @tackytigerfic](https://tumblr.com/blog/tackytigerfic) on there!


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